290 The Narrative Shape of Traumatic Experience

The Narrative Shape of

Traumatic Experience
Jane Robinett

The idea that narrative reflects lived experience, even the writer’s
experience, has long been dismissed as simplistic and credulous in the
postmodern academy. The “death of the subject,” as Jameson notes,
means a rejection of a belief in the self and produces a “new depth-
lessness” that valorizes surfaces and weakens notions of historicity, thus
detaching the writer from her experience.1 With the de-centering of the
notion of self, the idea of an inner domain of emotions and thoughts
that gives public voice to lived experience is rendered pointless. In
postmodern trauma theory, this idea has been extended by the work
of trauma theorists like Cathy Caruth and others who insist on the
fundamental “inaccessibility of trauma.”2 Caruth has drawn scientific
support for her position from the work of neurobiologist Bessel van
der Kolk and his associates on how traumatic memories are encoded
in the brain. Van der Kolk holds that because people who undergo
psychological trauma suffer “speechless terror . . . the experience can-
not be organized on a linguistic level” and thus becomes not only
inaccessible but also unrepresentable.3
Thus, key theoretical positions on trauma reinforce the postmodern-
ist position that lived experience, and especially traumatic experience,
resists linguistic representation and in doing so, separates the writer from
lived experience. We are left with the sense that narrative and experience
can have little, if anything, to do with each other. Mattingly points out
that even much of current narrative theory takes the position that to
treat narratives as direct expressions of action or experience is “naive
and false.”4 But, if experience, and traumatic experience in particular,
cannot be represented in language, how are we to understand narratives
that clearly bear a relationship to the writer’s lived experience? Why
do trauma survivors continue to tell stories in which experience and
narrative, especially in the case of trauma narratives, are, in fact, very
closely interwoven, as demonstrated in works like those of Holocaust

Literature and Medicine 26, no. 2 (Fall 2007) 290–311

© 2008 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
Jane Robinett 291

survivor Elie Wiesel (Night), American slaves like Frederick Douglass

(Autobiography), and combat veterans like Tim O’Brien (The Things They
Carried)? And why does no less a critic than Adorno write that “. . .
in art alone . . . suffering can still find its own voice”?5
Although the idea that traumatic experience can be expressed
effectively in narrative is unacceptable among many trauma and
narrative theorists, equally important theorists suggest a need for a
reconsideration of that position. For example, studies of the cognitive,
physiological, psychological, and behavioral implications of expressive
writing corroborate what readers of literature have long suspected:
writers often turn intuitively to writing as a way of confronting and
surviving trauma suffered in their own lives.6 We see this vividly il-
lustrated in the words of a Holocaust survivor, haunted by a horrific
recurring dream of the gas chamber:

One night when the nightmare was particularly intimidating, I

arose, switched on the light, found an old notebook and pen, and
started to write. Night and day I wrote, like a man possessed. . . .
Like a viper, the nightmare tried to sneak by, but, with pen in hand,
I stabbed it repeatedly, pushing it back. Gradually, the nightmare
receded until it disappeared completely. I had begun my journey
back to sanity.7

A review of work in clinical studies of post-traumatic stress disorder

(Scurfield, Brown and Fromm, Janoff-Bulman, Herman, King, King and
Fairbank, Solomon); in psychology, sociology and cognitive sciences (Pen-
nebaker and Beall, Pennebaker (1990), Pennebaker (1997), Smyth, True
and Souto, Lepore and Symth, Campbell and Pennebaker, Hellewell);
in psychobiology (van der Kolk; Frewen; Vieweg; Olff, Langeland and
Gersons); and in occupational therapy (Mattingly and Mattingly, Garro),
indicates that there may be good reason to reconsider the relationship
of narrative to lived experience. Recently, for example, Ruth Leys, in
her role as “historian or genealogist of trauma,”8 has written a tren-
chant critique of current trauma theory as embodied in the work of
Caruth and van der Kolk. In doing so, she has also pointed out the
divide between mimetic and antimimetic positions in current theories
of trauma and detailed the ways in which the polarization of those
positions does little to provide understanding or help for the clinical
practitioner. By turning clinical insights toward literary trauma narratives,
we may well discover that some writers have indeed found eloquent
linguistic expression for their traumatic experiences. This turn will not
292 The Narrative Shape of Traumatic Experience

in any way mean a return to naive realism or to unconsidered and

careless parallels between experience and story. Instead, it will invite
a more complex evaluation of the relationship between narrative and
experience.
Trauma theorist Kali Tal has suggested that the literature of
trauma “is defined by the identity of its author” and is centered on
“the reconstruction and recuperation of the traumatic experience.”9
Mattingly, while maintaining the position that narrative and experience
are closely related, argues that “narrative imitates experience because
experience already has in it the seeds of narrative.”10 “Narratives,”
she writes, “. . . are not just about experiences. Experiences are, in a
sense, about narratives. That is, narratives are not primarily after-the-
fact imitations of the experiences they recount. Rather, the intimate
connection between story and experience results from the structure of
action itself.”11 This position extends and complicates the Aristotelian
idea of the relationship between experience and narrative, which holds
that narrative imitates experience for the express purpose of clearing
away from the story the clutter and trivia of everyday living to reveal
the deeper meaning of lived experience.12 Mattingly further suggests
that “. . . narrative and experience are bound in a homologous rela-
tionship, not merely a referential one.”13 Two narratives that fit both
Tal’s and Mattingly’s descriptions are All Quiet on the Western Front,
by Erich Maria Remarque, and The Sorrow of War, by Bao Ninh (his
pen name). The identities of the two authors certainly qualify their
texts as trauma narratives.
Remarque served in the German Army on the Western Front
during World War I. Bao Ninh, a member of the Glorious 27th Youth
Brigade, served in the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) from 1969 until
the war’s end.14 Both men are combat veterans: of the five hundred
members of his brigade, Bao Ninh is one of only ten survivors. In
examining these soldiers’ stories, the question, as Mattingly suggests,
“is not whether stories are true or not but a deeper question of cor-
respondence between narrative as form and the form of action and
experience.”15 The correspondence between the form of the experience
these novels represent and the form of their narratives reveals a close
correlation between the experiences of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
(PTSD) and narrative structure itself.
Before we begin our discussion, a brief review of the two novels
is in order. Remarque’s All Quiet was an unprecedented success, selling
1.2 million copies during its first year of publication. It follows the
experiences of Paul Baumer, a young German soldier serving on the
Jane Robinett 293

Western Front during World War I. The book was controversial from
the start and was later banned by the rising Nazi party. Remarque fled
to Switzerland and was later stripped of his German citizenship. He
died in Locarno in 1970. Bao Ninh’s book, an account of the wartime
and post-war experiences of a North Vietnamese soldier named Kien,
enjoyed early success in Vietnam following its publication in Hanoi in
1991. However, it was soon banned by the Vietnamese government,
although photocopies of the work continued to be sold on the black
market. The manuscript was smuggled out of Vietnam, then trans-
lated and published in 1993 in Great Britain, where the book won
The Independent Foreign Fiction Award. Bao Ninh continues to live
and work in Vietnam and, in 1998, attended a writer’s conference in
Boston at the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social
Consequences.
On the surface, we might expect All Quiet and Sorrow to differ
substantially, as they appear to represent Western and Eastern cultures,
losing and winning sides of the conflicts, and sharply disparate military
strategies and tactics, political ideologies, geographies, and climates, not
to mention differing literary traditions. It might be tempting to assume
that the structure of each story reflects the narrative conventions of the
time in which it was written or of two distinct cultures and literary
traditions. But the correspondences between the two narratives suggest
a convergence of the nature of traumatic experience and the culture
of war itself that creates linkages powerful enough to overcome their
differences.
The current diagnostic criteria from the Diagnostic and Statisti-
cal Manual of Mental Disorders-IV outline a traumatic event as one in
which the person experiences, witnesses, or is confronted with an event
or events that involve “actual or threatened death or serious injury,
or other threat to one’s physical integrity” or that of another person.
The response to such an event involves “intense fear, helplessness, or
horror” because, in the face of these events, the person can neither
escape nor resist effectively.16 Traumatic events put the individual at
risk psychologically as well as physically because they “overwhelm
the ordinary systems of care that give people a sense of control, con-
nection and meaning . . . .”17 Terror and helplessness overburden the
ordinary psychic defenses, exploding the grounds of the belief systems
on which we build, and with which we defend, our individual and
collective identities. In Shattered Assumptions Janoff-Bulman points out
that those who suffer from psychological trauma must deal not only
with the threat to their physical survival, but also with “the survival
294 The Narrative Shape of Traumatic Experience

of their conceptual system . . . the very assumptions that had provided

[the] psychological coherence and stability” of their worlds prior to
the traumatic events.18 Exactly because of the shattering of such fun-
damental conceptual systems, conventional narrative structure must be
broken apart and reconfigured as well, since it becomes inadequate to
contain such problematic experience.
In the two novels under consideration here, the central figures,
Paul (All Quiet) and Kien (Sorrow), experience war in very much the
same way because of the nature or culture of war itself. The weapons,
for example, are fundamentally the same and produce the same kinds
of wounding, mutilation, and death. There are other common threats to
soldiers including disease, harsh weather, lack of food and sleep, and
incompetent and inexperienced officers and soldiers. Extensive work
by Kardiner;19 Grinker and Speigel;20 Green, Grace and Lindy;21 and
the National Vietnam Veteran Readjustment Study22 has shown that
the longer or more intense the exposure to combat, the greater the
likelihood of psychological damage. Both narratives deal with soldiers
exposed to combat over a period of years (roughly three and ten years,
respectively).23
Both Remarque and Bao Ninh make it clear that writing has
played a role in recovery from trauma. Like their central characters,
both men are survivors not only of the trauma of war, but of the
trauma of being a survivor when so many others have perished. But
only Bao Ninh addresses this in his narrative. In All Quiet, Paul is
the last of his group to die. As the narrative draws near its end, he
withdraws into hopelessness and isolation, and the final words of the
narrative are spoken by an unnamed narrator who reports his death.
In Sorrow, Kien is the only survivor of two different groups of which
he was a part: the 27th Youth Brigade, which was wiped out, and his
own platoon of thirteen scouts. Kien, too, falls into despair and isola-
tion after the war’s end. But as time passes, something new surfaces in
Kien’s awareness: “. . . an odd idea takes root in his mind.” He comes
to believe that he has survived the war in order to “perform some
unnamed heavenly duty. A task that is sacred and noble but secret”
(50). Near the novel’s end we are told that Kien “wrote because he
had to write, not to publish. He had to think on paper” (230).
But there is a great deal more here than thinking on paper. Judith
Herman lays out three stages in the process of recovery from trauma:
the establishment of safety, “remembrance and mourning,” and “recon-
nection with ordinary life.”24 She designates one of the central tasks of
the third stage as finding the “survivor’s mission.”25 Interestingly, her
Jane Robinett 295

choice of military-religious language matches Kien’s sense of what he

is doing by writing as he realizes that his novel is “his last adventure
as a soldier . . . his last duty as a soldier,” in short, his last mission
(50). What drives Kien, as it must have driven Bao Ninh and Erich
Maria Remarque, originates in what occurs in the last stage of recovery
from trauma. Scurfield, in his overview of post-trauma stress research,
names this stage the “integration of the trauma experience,” the stage
in which the survivor begins to articulate the traumatic experience in
order to impose some order on it.26
In Time and Narrative, Paul Ricoeur says that “action is in quest
of a narrative,”27 a claim that argues that action can be understood
as a form of story yet to be told. This concept is fully evident in
Sorrow in Kien’s struggle to develop a narrative form that will render
his traumatic experience of war comprehensible. Kien begins to write
after a particularly intense, hallucination. In his room in Hanoi, he
sees, hears, and feels the battle in the Screaming Souls Jungle, and
“bewildered, confused and deeply troubled,” he begins to write, first
“almost mechanically” and then “frantically, nonstop” through the night
(86). The next morning he feels “unbalanced” and strange, significantly,
just as he had felt the first time he was wounded. But he also feels
he has been “born again,” an idea reinforced (if somewhat artificially)
by the fact that he begins to write on the first day of spring (87).
As he continues to write, he discovers that he has no control over
the narrative. Although he attempts to impose a traditional structure
on the narrative, dealing with “the problem of paragraphs and pages,”
planning the sequences, and laying “the design . . . out in his mind”
before he begins to write, the narrative resists this structure. His “neat
designs” shift and “blur” and the “sequences lose their order” (48–49).
Still, “he continues his quest for perfection, crossing out, erasing, cross-
ing out again, editing, tearing up some pages, then tearing up and
destroying all. Then he starts over again . . .” (49).28
His attempts at narrative structure and logical sequence fail be-
cause there “is something else that needs to be addressed, something
intangible, other than the writing” (49). The traumatic nature of what
he wants to portray does not fit into the structure he attempts to im-
pose on it. He recognizes that “there is a force at work in him that
he cannot resist, though it opposes every orthodox attitude taught to
him . . . his task [is] to expose the realities of war and to tear aside
conventional images” (50). Though Kien is a writer, a journalist by
profession, he cannot find a ready-made narrative form to shape these
experiences. The novel seems “to have its own logic, its own flow . . .
296 The Narrative Shape of Traumatic Experience

to structure itself . . . to make its own detours.” It follows “the course

of some mystical logic” (88). The recursive, splintered, tangled cadence
of psychological trauma provided the essential framework; the deaths
of ordinary soldiers “provided the rhythm for [Kien’s] writing,” (89)
just as they did for Paul’s narrative in All Quiet.
Kien’s account shares some significant elements with Remarque’s
account of how he came to write All Quiet. In 1929, Remarque told
Axel Eggebrecht, that he had, for some time, been suffering from
“serious bouts of depression.”29 He could not understand the cause
of this despondency and finally undertook a conscious and extended
effort to determine its source. “It was through these deliberate acts
of self-analysis that I found my way back to my war experiences,”
he reports.30 When he recovered these experiences, he wrote All Quiet
over a period of six months, writing for long stretches at a time, day
and night, allowing the memories of his experiences to shape the flow
of the narrative. In Bao Ninh’s case, Kien’s postwar assignment on
the Missing In Action Remains-Gathering Team provides an effective
paradigm for the “mystical logic” of structure. Gathering the physical
remains of the dead takes him back over old battlegrounds and provides
a physical experience analogous to articulating traumatic memories in
writing this narrative. The fragments (remains) must be deliberately
sought out and identified; missing men (and memories) must be ac-
counted for and given proper burial, or their spirits will continue to
haunt not only the forests and hills where the men died, but Kien’s
post-war life as well. Martha Wolfenstein says that to speak of trauma
“. . . provides the possibility of turning passivity into activity . . . from
being the helpless victim one becomes the effective storyteller, and it is
the others, the audience, who are made to undergo the experience.”31
Though her references are to speaking, clinical studies over the last
two decades have amply demonstrated that writing about trauma has
proved to be equally effective in recovery.32
Although determined, in part, by the individual’s response to
traumatic experience, the symptoms of psychological trauma can be
grouped into a small number of clusters. Herman suggests three groups:
hyperarrousal, in which there is a persistent expectation of danger, in-
cluding startle reactions and hyperalertness; intrusion, during which the
traumatic events are relived “as if they were occurring in the present”
in intense flashbacks, hallucinations and dreams; and constriction, mani-
fested in numbing, withdrawal, indifference, emotional detachment, a
sense of acute passivity or surrender.33 Implicit in this set of symptoms
is a contradictory structure that is at once chaotic and fathomable,
Jane Robinett 297

which Herman identifies as the “dialectic of trauma.”34 Janoff-Bulman

asserts that “intrusive thoughts and images typically alternate with
periods of denial and emotional numbing.”35 This assertion, however,
suggests a greater regularity in the dialectic of trauma than the actual
fragmentation of daily life which these symptoms cause. More typically,
hyperarousal, intrusion, and constriction set up an irregular, recursive
construct in the trauma survivor’s life, sometimes existing below the
surface of consciousness for years, only to emerge when triggered by
a physical or emotional event.36
Herman points out that because of these recurrent interruptions,
people who suffer from psychological trauma “cannot resume the
normal course of their lives”37 because these symptoms disrupt the
fundamental interior narrative which normal adults continually con-
struct for, and about, themselves and their world. Traumatic experience
produces narrative structures that are fractured and erratic, structures
which will not sustain integrated notions of self, society, culture, or
world. If Remarque and Bao Ninh are to successfully re/present the
experience of war and of the combat soldier in texts that bind narrative
and experience into a homologous relationship capable of reconstruct-
ing and recuperating the traumatic experiences they have survived,
they must find appropriate structures to embody these disruptions. By
examining not just content but also the structure of literary works that
rise out of the traumatic experience of the writer, we can extend our
understanding of that relationship and begin to re-frame the complex
bond between the two.
In The Sorrow of War, the abrupt, capricious shifts wrought by
intrusion and constriction shape Kien’s days and nights, “paining then
numbing his own turbulent soul.”38 His account of his post-war life does
not fit neatly into conventional narrative structure. “Often,” he says,

. . . in the middle of a busy street, in broad daylight, I’ve sud-

denly become lost in a daydream. On smelling the stink of rotten
meat I’ve suddenly imagined I was back crossing Hamburger Hill
in 1972, walking over strewn corpses. The stench of death is often
so overpowering I have to stop in the middle of the pavement,
holding my nose, while startled, suspicious people step around me
avoiding my mad stare. (46)

The subtle shift in tenses (from present perfect to past and abruptly
into present) in the middle of the paragraph moves readers directly into
the experience just as the narrator abruptly finds himself reliving it.
298 The Narrative Shape of Traumatic Experience

In another passage, years after his war experiences, he sits watching a

pantomime performance in a theater when traumatic memory intrudes:
“The audience around him in the theater had seen Kien suddenly sit
bolt upright, remembering the war scene clearly. His attention to the
pantomime faded as the sharp detail of the tragic love story of his
men and the three farm girls unfolded in his mind” (35).
These three girls, the lovers of three of the men in Kien’s scout
platoon, were raped and murdered by ARVN commandos.39 In Kien’s
account of that story, which follows the passage above, the narrative
immediately shifts out of past tense, which has been used to express
Kien’s post-war life, and into present tense of traumatic memory as the
narrator re-experiences and recounts the story. These precipitous shifts
in tense deliberately violate the conventions of narrative structure, but
they faithfully reproduce the intensity of the traumatic memory as it
intrudes into the narrator’s post-war life, and ensnare the reader in
the traumatic experience as well. The fact that this incident is told
from a third-person point of view, rather than the first person that is
used elsewhere, is indicative of the disassociation the narrator feels, a
disassociation that corresponds to constriction.
The disconcerting cadences of hyperarousal, intrusion, and con-
striction do not just confine themselves conveniently to some post-war
period. In All Quiet, Paul, home on leave, withdraws from social contact,
preferring to be alone. Later, he tells us that “. . . life is simply one
continual watch against the menace of death;—it has transformed us
into unthinking animals in order to give us the weapon of instinct—it
has reinforced us with dullness, so that we do not go to pieces before
the horror, which would overwhelm us if we had clear, conscious
thought . . . it has lent us the indifference of wild creatures . . . .” 40
This passage illustrates the fundamental dialectic of trauma: the constant
vigilance and tense fear of hyperarousal and the withdrawal and numb-
ing of constriction. In terms of narrative structure, this dialectic finds
expression in a perpetual, intense present and in a repetitive syntax
that stalls anticipated narrative movement in a series of hyphenated
clauses which, in turn, are further encumbered by qualifying clauses.
In addition, the numbing and indifference of constriction accounts for
the flat, mechanical tone in which the narrator recites the intellectual,
emotional, and psychological disarray to which the soldiers have
been reduced. Although “rarely does an incident strike out a spark”
of emotional response strong enough to cut through the indifference
and dullness of constriction, there are moments when Paul finds that
“unexpectedly a flame of grievous and terrible yearning flares up”
Jane Robinett 299

(279). In Sorrow, Kien, too, experiences an abrupt, intrusive longing

for what has been lost: “it was a kind of nostalgia, like the immense
sadness of a world at dusk . . . a missing, a pain which could send
one soaring back into the past” (94). Nothing in the ongoing narrative
of either novel prepares the reader in any way for the appearance of
these moments, nor are they commented upon or underscored.
Other kinds of emotional and intellectual intrusions break into the
narrative thread, among the most powerful of which are moments of
recognition when the soldier abruptly sees his enemy as a man like
himself. Vividly illustrative are two incidents that occur in similar
situations in the narratives. In All Quiet, Paul takes shelter from a
bombardment in a shell crater. A French soldier, also seeking shelter,
leaps into the crater. Paul stabs him, and then, as the man lies fatally
wounded, tries to help him. Forced to share the crater all night with
his dying enemy, Paul recognizes their essential kinship, and is filled
with guilt, contrition, and remorse. In Sorrow, we encounter, without
warning, the story of Phan. Like Paul, he takes shelter in a shell hole
during a battle. When an enemy soldier falls into the same crater, he
stabs the man, realizing afterwards that the man had already been
seriously wounded when he stumbled into the hole. Filled with pity
and horror, Phan, too, tries to help his dying enemy. When the raid
stops, he leaves the man propped up against the side of the shell
hole and goes to look for help. He finds a medical field kit among
the dead soldiers, but by that time, he cannot remember which crater
he has left the man in. He wanders over the battlefield all night in
the heavy rain, calling for his wounded enemy. At daylight, he sees
that all of the craters have filled up with water. Both incidents are
recounted without any attempt to connect them to the narrative mate-
rial which precedes or follows it. In Sorrow, Phan, who narrates this
incident, vanishes from the narrative.
At the center of both of these accounts lies the recognition of
the Enemy as a human being, trapped like oneself in horrific circum-
stances, and the shock of recognition momentarily breaks through the
narrator’s shell of emotional numbing and constriction. Kien calls that
numbing his “soldier’s defense,” and when it is intact, he is “uncon-
cerned and coldly indifferent, showing no fear, no anger. Just lethargy
and depression” in combat (17). As we saw earlier, Paul, too, speaks
of the “dullness” of the soldiers, “so that [they] do not go to pieces
before the horror,” and of the “indifference” that allows them to sur-
vive (278–79). In each case, the unadorned and understated language
and uncomplicated syntax of these incidents mirror the psychological
disassociation of the narrator.
300 The Narrative Shape of Traumatic Experience

Memory and remembering threaten trauma survivors not only in

their daily lives, but also because they serve to isolate survivors from
both their untraumatized past and the possibility of a reconnection to a
future life. In All Quiet, to remember, while at war, a life before war can
lead to disaster. Paul tells us the story of Detering, whose “misfortune
was that he saw a cherry tree in a garden” (280). Remembering his
own cherry orchard in bloom, Detering deserts. He is caught by the
military police and not heard of again, in all probability executed for
desertion. A similar fate awaits one of the scouts in Kien’s unit. Can,
who is plagued by recurring dreams of his aged mother calling him,
deserts (22). Several days later, the military police find Can’s corpse
on a dead-end track only two hours from their camp.
In each of these cases, neither narrator comments or elaborates
on the events. Instead, silence surrounds these fragmentary narratives,
isolating them within the larger narrative. No attempt is made to in-
tegrate them into any other narrative event or structure. They occur
almost casually, with the flatness that psychological trauma produces
in its constrictive forms. The language and syntax are unvaryingly
straightforward, and within each narrative fragment there is a linear-
ity which is not present in the text as a whole. The flatness of the
tone and structure and the indifference to the often spectacular hor-
ror of the events leaves the reader stunned not only at the incidents
themselves, but also at the recognition of the state out of which the
narrator is speaking.
Traumatic disjunction occurs away from the combat zone as well.
The failure of friends, neighbors, and other civilians, older and younger,
to recognize the complexity of the losses produced by participation in
combat and the resulting psychological trauma adds another layer to the
devastation which the soldier must endure, and this lack of compassion
deepens his isolation. This contrasts sharply with the attitudes shown
toward the young men prior to the start of the war. In both of these
narratives, the schoolteachers are the trusted authorities and mentors
for these young men and press them hard to volunteer, telling them
that they are “young heroes,” the “Iron Youth” (53, 21) or Kien’s case,
“the young angels of [the] revolution, [who] will rescue mankind” (118).
But romantic concepts of the warrior/hero do not prepare them for
the kinds of destruction that await in combat. When Paul speaks of
“fields of craters within and without,” he acknowledges the destruction
of much more than the physical world (276). Paul speaks for Kien as
well as for his own comrades when he says that “the first bombardment
showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they taught it to
Jane Robinett 301

us broke in pieces” (15). As prior conceptions of worth and value are

pointless in the face of such devastation, so are prior conceptions of
narrative structure and language nearly useless for conveying traumatic
experience. Yet both Remarque and Bao Ninh have managed to find
both structure and language that are suited to the difficult task.
One example of this aptness occurs in Sorrow in a description of
the deep disjunction that Kien feels in the years following the war:

In later years [he] experienced several similar, even identical mo-

ments, long periods of withdrawal. Like the dead, one felt no fear,
no enthusiasm, no joy; no sadness, no feelings for anything. No
concerns and no hopes. One was totally devoid of feeling and had
no regard for the clever or the stupid, the brave or the cowardly,
commanders or privates, friend or foe, life or death, happiness or
sadness. It was all the same; it amounted to nothing. (213)

Trauma shapes the structure and language of the whole passage. With
its lack of detail or commentary, its repetitive naming and binary nouns,
the continual use of the undefined and impersonal pronoun, and the
insistent “no,” it illustrates the “nothing” that it names. Rhetorically,
the lack of linguistic and syntactic variety makes the account very
nearly “all the same.”
Like Kien, when Paul tries to think about what he will do in
peacetime, he draws a complete blank: “I can’t even imagine anything.
All I do know is that this business about professions and studies and
salaries and so on—it makes me sick, it is and always was disgusting.
I don’t see anything—I don’t see anything at all . . .” (91). The struc-
ture of his reflections, full of repetitions, generalizations, and names
without details, indicates the difficulty of finding language and form
to articulate or even imagine his position. Even his sense that life has
always been “disgusting” reveals his loss of perspective as well as the
loss of his untraumatized past and his isolation in the continuing and
inescapable present. Just how much Paul feels has been lost is clear
when he points out that “. . . the generation that grew up before us,
though it has passed these years with us here, already had a home
and a calling; now it will return to its old occupations, and the war
will be forgotten—and the generation that has grown up after us will
be strange to us and push us aside” (298). Paul, however, does not
survive his war.
Although Kien, in Sorrow, does survive to have a post-war life, he
has a very similar reaction to the possibilities that lie ahead of him:
302 The Narrative Shape of Traumatic Experience

. . . he had no idea how he would spend the rest of this life. Study?
Career? Business? All those things he had once considered important,
and attainable, suddenly seemed meaningless and beyond his reach
. . . he had no idea how he would earn his daily living. It was a
time of utter isolation, of spiritual emptiness, of surrender. (74)

Here, too, both structure and content indicate that neither of these
young men can imagine a place for themselves in the confines of a
world in which they can no longer believe. Remarque and Bao Ninh
make it clear that their soldiers have been isolated not only from
the existing social systems of belief, culture, and care, but also from
the flow of the generations and the support it might offer. Kien has
no family living, and even Phuong, the woman whom he loved, has
become someone he can hardly recognize.
The indications of intrusion and constriction discernible in the
content, language, and structure of the passage above show how trauma
follows Kien into his post-war life and makes his return to civilian life
exceedingly difficult for him. His memories haunt him, intense, vivid,
hallucinatory, and detailed. Herman points out that traumatic memories
“are not encoded like ordinary memories of adults in a verbal, linear
narrative that is assimilated into an ongoing life story . . . [lacking]
verbal narrative and context, they are encoded in the form of vivid
sensations and images.”41 We see this clearly as Kien attempts to re-
call his entrance into the war. The first time this memory returns, he
only “dimly recalled dreaming some ugly scenes . . . in contrasting
black-and-white images, like negatives on film” (202). But near the end
of his narrative, when he is finally able to put those memories into
language, his account is neither dim nor vague, but densely detailed
and agonizingly rendered:

. . . a jet screamed in on a long dive, strafing the train . . . among

the tracer bullets, he could detect . . . a silver napalm canister, glit-
tering in the sunlight, its long shiny sides giving off a gleam as it
came in at horrifying speed. Then another, and another. They hit the
engine and the station almost soundlessly. Kien saw a black cloud,
then the air crackled like broken glass and the earth seemed to be
heaving under them, then falling again . . . explosions punched
into their faces . . . pressure waves shuddered through them . . .
bomb after bomb exploded darkening the day. One series hit behind
them, one in front of them, and one right on target, hitting the rear
locomotive . . . it blew up with tremendous force, and for a long
time it rained burning charcoal and hot water . . . . (208–209)
Jane Robinett 303

Unlike the flat, stripped-down prose that marks moments of constriction

in the narrative, what predominates in intrusive traumatic memories are
vivid physical sensations and intense, highly detailed images, memories
“of silent pictures as sharp as a mountain profile and as dense as
deep jungle” (88). Unexpectedly, the narrative structure opens up to
include syntactical variety, figurative language, and verbs that capture
and convey movement, light, sound, and violent physical force. There
are similar shifts in structure and language in All Quiet. Paul and his
companions come upon an equally detailed and horrific scene as they
make their way up to the front lines into combat:

In the branches dead men are hanging. A naked soldier is squatting

in the fork of a tree, he still has his helmet on, otherwise he is
entirely unclad. There is only half of him sitting up there, the top
half, the legs are missing. Over there lies a body with nothing but
a piece of the underpants on one leg and the collar of the tunic
around its neck . . . the clothes are hanging up in the tree. Both
arms are missing as though they had been pulled out . . . . (214)

Here the details are restricted to the visual, a limitation that suggests
the disassociated and detached state of the observer (Paul), who notes,
almost casually, only the unusual positions of the mutilated bodies and
the remnants of the clothing. No emotional response to the scene is
evident.42
By contrast, traumatic memories can be equally unbearable in
their images of beauty and peace. On sentry duty after a battle, Paul
suddenly sees

. . . a picture, a summer evening, I am in the cathedral cloister

and look at the tall rose trees that bloom in the middle of the little
cloister garden where the monks lie buried . . . a great quietness
rules in this blossoming quadrangle, the sun lies warm on the heavy
grey stones, I place my hand upon them and feel the warmth. At
the right-hand corner the green cathedral spire ascends into the pale
blue sky of the evening. (123)

Paul’s memories of his pre-war life have two distinct qualities: a com-
plete calm and a wordless, timeless silence that speaks compellingly.
The image contains all that he has lost: peace, protection, shelter, the
bloom of life, quiet, warmth, faith, and a death that is not violent
and grotesque, but orderly, peaceful, and comprehensible. Here, the
304 The Narrative Shape of Traumatic Experience

structure opens up to sensory detail and the sentences are complete,

unhyphenated. But his response is not so much desire for a past life,
as we noted earlier, but “sorrow—a strange, inapprehensible melan-
choly” (125). The intrusive memory exercises such a strong hold on
Paul that he must resort to checking on the state of his rifle to bring
himself back to reality.
For Kien, too, there are memories as still and beautiful as Paul’s
vision of the cloister: “Memories of a midday in the dry season in
beautiful sunshine, flowers in radiant blossom in the tiny forest clear-
ing; memories also of a difficult rainy day by the flooded Sa Thay
river when he had to go into the jungle to collect bamboo shoots and
wild turnips” (88). But several pages later, we discover, in a second
memory of that river, that the “difficult day” referred to includes: “. . .
a rain of arms and legs dropping before him onto the grass by the
Sa Thay River during a night raid by B-52s” (90). The “rainy day” of
the earlier memory is stunningly illuminated. These two images do not
occur on the same page; the images of remembered tranquility and
beauty precede but fail to foreshadow the terrible rain of the second
image. The structures that Bao Ninh uses here are both recursive and
disjointed as he shifts from a peaceful memory of a forest clearing to
those of a merely “difficult rainy day” in the jungle to an overwhelm-
ing and traumatic one. Here, as elsewhere, neither of these images is
commented on, leaving the reader to witness Kein’s memories in the
same kind of wordless stillness that Remarque features. The silence
that surrounds these fragments becomes an essential part of the nar-
rative structure.43
As we have seen, both Bao Ninh and Remarque subvert conven-
tional narrative structures in order to communicate traumatic experi-
ence. The structure of Remarque’s novel, however, is more conventional
than Bao Ninh’s. There are a number of ways to account for this, not
the least of which is that Remarque was writing at a time when psy-
chological trauma was rarely spoken of outside of clinical situations.
Janet Oppenheim illustrates public attitudes toward males in a study
of depression in Victorian and Edwardian England.44 During that pe-
riod, men were expected to be models of self-discipline, emotional and
intellectual discretion, characterized by the suppression of any display
of emotion and a determination not to give way to “womanish wail-
ings.”45 Nervous collapse among males was believed to be the result
of a failure of the will; “the man with shattered nerves,” writes Op-
penheim, “was not merely pitiable but also somehow blameworthy.”46
Such attitudes hardened in the first two decades of the 20th century,
Jane Robinett 305

and following the First World War, the “public saw in shell-shocked
servicemen cowards who demonstrated their lack of moral fiber by . . .
repudiating patriotism.”47 Remarque was well aware of attitudes that
imputed moral blame and manly inadequacy to any expression of
depression or shell shock. But he was also unable to escape from his
traumatic experiences. About the time that All Quiet was published, he
said in an interview that “the shadow of war hung over us, especially
when we tried to shut our minds to it.”48 To speak directly of war
experiences in ways that would be seen as unmanly and unpatriotic
was a dangerous breach of social and political orthodoxies.49
Yet Remarque not only chooses to write of his experiences, he
does so in an unconventional way, one that depends on a fragmented,
episodic web. The narrative opens without preamble in the middle of
the narrator’s war experiences. Having come off the front line after two
weeks of battle, Paul and his fellows are resting. The fighting that led
to the deaths of half the company is completely passed over, although
another writer might have seized on the opportunity for dramatic ac-
tion. As readers, we are thrown directly into the story and must try
to orient ourselves as best we may.
The novel is almost entirely lacking in ordinary transitional de-
vices. As we have seen in the examples cited earlier, Remarque shifts
from present to past tense, frequently relying on casual lateral shifts,
repositions, and alternate scenes whose rhythms echo the troop move-
ments to and from the front and in and out of battle, with sudden
dislocations triggered by hyperarousal, intrusion, and constriction. Al-
most as if to balance the fragmented structure, Remarque sustains the
continuity and intensity of these experiences by maintaining a consistent
first-person narrative voice in Paul. Although his structure seems more
familiar to contemporary readers than Bao Ninh’s, at the time it was
written, it constituted an essential departure from the careful, archi-
tectural narrative structures of his contemporaries. The use of thinly
connected scenes, the unmarked transitions, abruptly shifting tenses,
and the inclusion of intrusive memories and traumatic experiences set
his book apart from most novels of his era. It is worth noting that in
making the film of this novel, American director Lewis Milestone at-
tempted to maintain this fragmented structure by shooting scenes and
then fading to black without creating any transitional links, visual or
verbal, between the scenes.50
Bao Ninh, on the other hand, feels no need to maintain continuity
in any conventional sense. He makes use of constant shifts in tense,
flashing backward and forward, following the rhythms of intrusion
306 The Narrative Shape of Traumatic Experience

and constriction, so that past and present become at some points so

interwoven as to be almost indistinguishable. He deliberately shifts
tenses, temporal and physical settings and narrative points of view
without warning, leaving the reader to make whatever adjustments
are necessary. Thus, while Remarque’s structure first appears more
conventional than Bao Ninh’s, neither writer appears unduly concerned
with continuity; rather, it is clear that they are allowing experience,
specifically traumatic experience, to shape their narratives.
The two writers breach the conventions of structure in other ways.
Time markers, for example, are either absent, very general, or deliber-
ately vague. Although Bao Ninh refers occasionally to years or battles
(the Tet offensive, Second Tet, the 1972 dry season); Remarque uses
only phrases such as “days go by,” “evening begins,” or “we travel for
several days” to indicate time passing. In the same way, place names,
though present, are often indicative of a general area (the Screaming
Souls jungle; a nameless village somewhere along the Western Front)
rather than a specific, detailed location. The entire setting for both
writers simply becomes the war itself, but the war extends far beyond
the time and place of the actual fighting. “. . . the curse of the front,”
says Paul, echoing Mephistopheles’ description of hell in Marlow’s Dr.
Faustus, “reaches so far that we never pass beyond it” (124–125).
Both All Quiet and Sorrows make clear that traumatic experience
may indeed be not only accessible to the survivor, but expressible lin-
guistically. Further, the value of trauma narratives does not lie only in
their power to promote recovery for their authors. As combat soldiers
and survivors, Remarque and Bao Ninh understand that “the natural
human response to horrible events is to put them out of mind,” that
is, to resort to silence, which many have suggested is the only pos-
sible response to trauma, and to denial.51 But traumatic memories do
not leave them alone, and these two writers chose to speak publicly
about the unspeakable. In doing so, they revealed an emerging moral
dimension to the narratives. For Remarque’s Paul, to remember his
experiences of the horror of war and the recognition that his enemies
are only “quiet men with their childlike faces and apostles’ beards” is
“the great, the sole aim, that I have thought of in the trenches . . . the
only possibility of existence . . . the task that will make life worthy of
these hideous years” (200). Perhaps Bao Ninh speaks for both writers
when he says, “It was necessary to write about the war, to touch read-
ers’ hearts, to move them with words of love and sorrow, to bring to
life the electric moments, to let them, in the reading and the telling,
feel they were there, in the past, with the author” (56).
Jane Robinett 307

Bao Ninh’s novel draws readers in through its very form, a

form that suggests new and important ways of reading his and other
trauma narratives. Near the middle of the book Kien, who has been
the central figure and narrator, disappears from the narrative and a
dramatized narrator, identified only as “I” appears and continues the
narrative. Kien has left behind only a chaotic, scattered manuscript.
The new narrator, a sort of editorial voice, or possibly the voice of
the official literary establishment, is persuaded to read this manuscript
by a mute girl who has kept the pages after Kien abandoned them.
When the first-person narrator tries to read Kien’s manuscript, he is
first puzzled and put off by its apparent anarchy:

. . . I tried to rearrange the manuscript pages into chronological

order, to make the manuscript read like the kind of book I was
familiar with. But it was useless . . . any page seemed like the first,
any page could have been the last. . . . From beginning to end the
novel consisted of blocks of images. A certain cluster of events, then
disruptions . . . Many would say this was a disruption of plot, a
disconnection, a loss of perspective (230).

The structure “I” describes here corresponds closely to the dialectic

of trauma that we earlier identified as characteristic of the structure
of psychological trauma. And the criticism of the narrative offered by
the “Many would say” suggests the standard responses critics and
readers might have when matrixes of narrative conventions and reader
expectations are not observed.
However, the dramatized narrator suggests another way to read
Kien’s manuscript. “I” takes a more “casual approach” and the “. . .
novel . . . took on another form, in harmony with the reality it de-
scribed” (231). As Wolfenstein has suggested, it now appears to be
this new reader/narrator who undergoes the traumatic experiences of
the writer. Kien/the writer becomes the “effective storyteller,” and the
dramatized narrator/reader begins to feel that his “own life and the
author’s had . . . become entwined, enmeshed in each other” (231). In
our terms, the structure of the novel here not only corresponds to the
realities of the experience of psychological trauma, but also provides
the reader an opportunity to identify with “I,” “in the past, with the
author,” and thereby achieve a virtual or symbolic experience of the
kind of homologous relationship Mattingly describes as central to the
connection between traumatic experience and narrative. However, as
we discover, “I” misreads (perhaps deliberately) Kien’s account, in an
308 The Narrative Shape of Traumatic Experience

attempt to bring it in line with the established governmental view of

the “painful but glorious days” of the war when “all of us were young,
very pure, and very sincere” (233). As readers, we are not deceived by
“I”’s move to co-opt Kien’s account of his experience; rather, it serves
to authenticate both Kien’s experiences and to strengthen the connection
we have made between traumatic experience and the narrative.
The substantive and startling correspondences between All Quiet
on the Western Front and The Sorrow of War, the homologous relation-
ship these narratives bear to the experience of the psychological trauma
their writers suffered in combat, and those writers’ ability to shape
their traumatic experience into narrative point to a need to reconsider
prevailing views of the relationship between narrative and experience.
While prevailing theories have provided many important understand-
ings of trauma and narrative, they do not yet adequately account for
the ways in which experience and narrative may shape one another.
Mattingly, on the other hand, suggests that there are ways in which
experience itself, and in particular traumatic experience, carries the seeds
of narrative. But what those seeds might be, how they are planted,
and what fruit they may or may not bear remains to be explored.
Closer scrutiny of the ways in which the complex rhetorical structures
of trauma narratives like All Quiet on the Western Front and The Sor-
row of War express traumatic experience will yield a richer account of
the ways “suffering can still find its own voice” as Adorno says, and
the ways in which the moral purpose and impact of such writing is
embodied, experienced, and understood.

NOTES

1. Jameson, Postmodernism, 6, 12.

2. Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 10.
3. Van der Kolk and Van der Hart, “The Intrusive Past,” 172.
4. Mattingly, Healing Dramas, 33.
5. Adorno, The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, 312.
6. See, for example, Pennebaker, Opening Up, and Lepore and Smyth, The
Writing Cure.
7. Stabholz, Seven Hells, xii. This book was originally printed in a Displaced
Persons Camp in Stuttgart, (West) Germany in 1945.
8. Leys, Trauma, 306.
9. Tal, Worlds of Hurt, 17.
10. Mattingly, 45.
11. Ibid., 19.
12. Aristotle, Poetics, 32.
13. Mattingly, 19.
14. North Vietnamese Army (NVA). The NVA is also referred to as the Regular
Army to distinguish it from the guerilla forces of the Viet Cong (VC).
Jane Robinett 309

15. Mattingly, 33.

16. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV, 424.
17. Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 33.
18. Janoff-Bulman, Shattered Assumptions, 64.
19. Kardiner, The Traumatic Neuroses of War.
20. Grinker and Speigel, Men Under Stress.
21. Green, Lindy, and Grace, “Posttraumatic Stress Disorder,” 406–11.
22. Kulka, The National Vietnam Veteran Readjustment Study.
23. Remarque served three years during World War I; Bao Ninh served for
six years with the NVA during the Vietnam War.
24. Herman, 155.
25. Ibid., 207.
26. Scurfield, “Post-trauma Stress Assessment,” 246.
27. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 74.
28. For the sake of linearity, I have rearranged the sequence in which these
passages occur. In the novel, they do not occur in sequence, a structural disjunction
that mirrors the fragmentation of traumatic memory and forces the reader to recon-
struct these experiences in her/his own mind, much as the trauma victim must.
29. Barker and Last, Erich Maria Remarque, 33.
30. Ibid.
31. Wolfenstein, Disaster, 139.
32. Pennebaker, Kiecolt-Glaser, and Glaser, “Disclosure of traumas and im-
mune function,” 230–45. See also Smyth, True, and Souto, “Effects of writing about
traumatic experience,” 161–172 and Lapore and Smyth, The Writing Cure.
33. Herman, 35–43.
34. Ibid., 47.
35. Janoff-Bulman, 108.
36. Scurfield, 47, 48.
37. Herman, 37.
38. Bao Ninh, The Sorrow of War, 26. Subsequent references are cited paren-
thetically.
39. ARVN—Army of the Republic of (South) Vietnam.
40. Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, 278–279. Subsequent references
cited parenthetically.
41. Herman, 37–38.
42. This passage calls to mind a similar one in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They
Carried when the soldiers are sent up into the trees to recover body parts.
43. We find this stillness and silence in another soldier’s story, this one told
by an American solider in Vietnam, a LURP (long-range reconnaissance patrol sol-
ider) in Michael Herr’s book, Dispatches: “Patrol went up the mountain. One man
came back. He died before he could tell us what happened” (6). That is the entire
story, stripped of its detail and reduced to the bones of its narrative structure by
a soldier caught by the iron constriction of psychological trauma. The silence that
surrounds those three sentences resonates with the unspeakable and constitutes the
fundamental narrative structure of this account.
44. Oppenheim, Shattered Nerves, 150.
45. Ibid., 151.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid., 152.
48. Barker and Last.
49. Just how dangerous it would be for Remarque became visible very quickly.
The book, although immensely popular, was attacked in Germany by both the right
and the left. On May 10, 1933, the book was burned by Josef Goebbels and the Ger-
man Students’ League, along with works by Kafka, Shakespeare, Mann, and others.
Nor was he the only member of his family to suffer. His younger sister Elfriede
310 The Narrative Shape of Traumatic Experience

was arrested in Germany in 1943 for voicing her opposition to both Hitler and the
war; Judge Roland Freisler sentenced her to death by decapitation.
50. As if to acknowledge a significant difference wrought by his war experi-
ence, following the end of World War I, Remarque changed his name from Paul
to Erich. Bao Ninh, as we have noted, is a pseudonym, based on the name of the
province where the writer’s father was born. In each case, the reasons for name
changes were quite likely political as well as personal.
51. Herman, 208.

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444 Contributors

Graduate Education in Medical Humanities: Models and Methods, a conference

held in March 2007 in Galveston to celebrate the thirty-fifth anniversary of
UTMB’s Institute for the Medical Humanities and the twentieth anniversary
of its medical humanities graduate program, the nation’s first.
Dana Medoro is an associate professor of American Literature at the Univer-
sity of Manitoba and author of The Bleeding of America (Greenwood Press,
2002). She is currently working on a book-length project on Nathaniel
Hawthorne and nineteenth-century medicine.
Kimberly R. Myers is Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities at
Penn State College of Medicine and in the Department of English at Penn
State University. Her book, Illness in the Academy: A Collection of Pathographies
by Academics, appeared in 2007 from Purdue University Press.
Suzanne Poirier is Professor Emerita of Literature and Medical Education
at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she taught students in all
fields of the health professions for twenty-five years. Her publications range
from women’s health to history of medicine, aging to AIDS. Her latest
book, tentatively titled Doctors in the Making: Memoirs of Medical Education,
is forthcoming from University of Iowa Press. She is currently exploring
avenues for goat farming in Arizona.
Jane Robinett teaches rhetoric and comparative literature at San Diego State
University. Her work on technology and literature has been published in
journals in Spain, Costa Rica, and the U.S., and in her book, This Rough
Magic: Technology in Latin American Fiction. She began working on literature
and medicine by examining the traditional healing methods among south-
western Native Americans and curanderos, their Mexican counterparts. Her
article, “Looking for Roots: Curandera and Shamanic Practices in Southwest
Fiction,” was published in Mosaic. She is currently at work on psychologi-
cal trauma narrative in the short stories of Joseph Conrad.
Melissa Smith received her doctorate from McMaster University in 2005,
and held a Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada (SSHRC)
postdoctoral fellowship at George Washington University from 2005 to
2007. She lives in Hamilton, Ontario, where she operates Naked Bard, a
Shakespeare education and entertainment group.
Susan Spearey is an Associate Professor of English at Brock University in
St. Catharines, Ontario Canada, and teaches also in an interdisciplinary
graduate program in Social Justice and Equity Studies. Her current research,
funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
(SSHRC) grant, focuses on the ethics of readership and the function of af-
fect in the context of literary mediations of contemporary histories of mass
violence, with particular emphasis on post-apartheid South African literature.
She has published articles in Journal of Commonwealth Literature, scrutiny2,
Postcolonial Text, and a number of edited collections.
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